Palimpsest
by The Cake Genius
Summary: You are a palimpsest, waiting for him to make you whole. [Very blurry Tom/Indigo. I promise I will write what I'm supposed to when I don't feel so sleepy.]


**Disclaimer: Don't own.**

**A/N: Oddly poetic. I do enjoy this sleepy feeling.**

**Let's all take a moment to appreciate the Tom Levin tumblr roleplayer who reblogs pictures of rooftops. *applauds* Well done.**

* * *

You sit on the roof in order to contemplate what an awful person you are.

No, really. You are an awful person.

You've been realizing this slowly over the course of several years in the few moments of silence you've let yourself have, and the seconds have added up into minutes, into hours and days of thought that settle like whispers on your shoulders.

_No one wants you._

And you breathe as you gaze over this place that is not home, but is. And you hug your arms and hum as you look at the sky that should seem polluted for all its smog, but it doesn't. It doesn't. And you think, hard, of a face that shouldn't seem beautiful, and is really quite strang, but it _is _beautiful, and you can't help that.

And you think of all the things that make you awful, and you realize that he must be perfect, because he is the opposite of you; like a print made from a carving, juxtaposed on itself, and you wonder how something so odd could be so lovely.

Lovely in the way that the night sky is lovely; hair like void with a smear of stars across that moon-face, a smile like a tear in your galaxy and eyes that seem like reflections of everything, anything good you can hold inside, the gentlest chord-

And it just _hurts_ because there is a big, blank space on your sheet music that you can't read for the love of God, and that space is colored indigo with the notes you would like to play and things that you mumble in your sleep. That space is filled with the deafening sound of rain and the lurching feeling you get when you can see the veins in his eyelids.

Maybe it was always supposed to be this way, because you noticed, from the beginning, that Indigo feels like home; a warm, blurry _home_ that you would like to wrap its arms around you; _shh, now, it will be okay._

But _home _has always meant _lonely_, and _alone_ has always meant _peace_, and _peace, sadness._

And you are realizing slowly on this rooftop, that you have always been sad, and you have always been empty. There is something _missing _inside of you, but you never realized it before, because it was like breathing: natural, necessary. And if that empty space is filled, if that dark matter in your galaxy of a heart is meant to be filled by _him_, then what will you do?

What will you do once everything is light and music and salvation in the form of one boy and his paradox stars?

So it is better, you realize, that you are alone. Because how would you function if you were not? Without loneliness, what could you drown in?

_But maybe you could drown in him._It makes sense, you see, because of how his eyes are filled with rain and starlight and a neverending string of questions, circling like a silver ring around _why._

The pain in your chest is lovely, the ache raw. You think you could fall into that nothingness-land where everything is fairytales.

You think that you would like to paint it indigo. You think that you could grow wings just to tear them off so that you could feel the thrill of that fall.

This boy, this mystery/explorer book, is made of in-between spaces, and you think you love those parts of him the best; the moments before his face decides to put on an expression, the skin between his ankles and jeans... the places where his bones peek, shy, through his gentle body... the shadow of his neck on his collarbone. He looks like someone has erased him and left a residue, a palimpsest. You could take one of Rose's charcoal pencils and draw him in, line by careful line as you sang him songs and _breathed _into his emptiness that matches yours.

_You were made to match._

But you know you'd just mess things up, in the end. Indigo pastels often smudge. Memories of him may cast a shadow onto your black hole heart, throwing the tender nuances of it into grotesque and harsh relief, and then they would _know._

They would know.

He would know.

It is better, to just imagine, because fantasy bleeds color onto the blank, white light of reality. It is better to _imagine_ (imagine, sharply, all bright and clean) the way his lips would taste- you wonder. Like flowers? Like the color blue? Like snow?

You used to play in the snow. You used to marvel in its sparkling, pristine glory. So pure, so beautifully perfect.

Then. of course, with a few stops of your boots- crunch, crunch- you would ruin it, and you would always somehow manage to be bewildered as to how you did it. Where, exactly, you'd gone wrong.

The hardest thing is, you _want. _You _know _it wouldn't, couldn't work, you _know _how awful of a person you are, so you understand that you do not deserve the luxury of Indigo Casson, even if you would like to drown in the warmth of this strange, light snow you've found somewhere within him. You do not have the privilege of making angels on the depths of him, and you do not have the right to catch soft, fat flakes of him on your tongue, because you are forbidden to taste heaven.

You don't think you'll go to heaven in the end, but you ponder on it more often then people may think. You feel that heaven must be full of high, high rooftops that gently, lovingly skim the pale wisps of the clouds that form his hair. You think that heaven's bridges are woven from cables formed by an infinite number of guitar strings. You think that you can catch glimpses of this place when your fingers lose themselves among the strings of your instrument. You wonder if you could feel heaven if he wrapped his arms around you and _held_. You wonder if there are angels singing in those ridges of ribs, if you could hear the notes if you clutched to those ribs like they were you lifeline and you were a starving man with only superglue to hold yourself together. You are _sure_ that you could find pages of sheet music if you searched amongst all the dips of his moon-skin with your lips.

There is poetry woven into the silken threads of him... but heaven is neither here nor there, because you are awful.

You are awful, and you are empty, and you are sick.

You bury your head in your hair/hands/knees/tears, because your sickness is so comforting in the way that only mono can rival.

You are awful because of the pain it brings to watch him sleep and imagine how his hair would feel between your fingertips.

You are awful because he beautiful. He is beautiful because you are awful.

A paradox.

Serene.

You are a palimpsest. You wait for him to draw you whole again.


End file.
